Indenture, Blackbirding and Women’s Cultures of Resistance in the Western Pacific

The event is organized by the ARC discovery grant project “Unfreedom, Voices, Redress: Plantation Cultures of the Western Pacific” in cooperation with the Global Heritage Lab.

Part of the BCDSS Series (Un)abhängige Ansichten.

The book talk will discuss recent publications by a writer (Kirsten McGavin), an artist (Jasmine Togo-Brisby) and a historian (Margaret Mishra). The three invited guests will engage in the question how indenture, blackbirding and other forms of dependency re-ordered the Western Pacific after slavery was abolished in the British Atlantic and in the US. It furthermore wants to pay special attention to not only Pacific but also Pacific women’s voices to shed light on the history of vast numbers of Indian, Pacific and Melanesian peoples displaced through (forced) migration and laboring on plantations that emerged in contexts of British (and German) colonial endeavors. 

Kirsten McGavin, Untethered: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Papua New Guinea (Kokomo Ink, 2025)

Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Ungeographic (Pātaka Art+Museum 2025). 

Margaret Mishra, Women, Indenture, and Resistance (Oxford UP, 2026) 

Registration:
https://uni-bonn.sciebo.de/apps/forms/qmFMzmfcoFabp2pj/submit